Week 13 Reading: Bhagawat

Reading: Bhagawat: The Krishna Avatar, Amar Chitra Katha


 I'm starting on a set of comics about Krishna's life. This first story deals with his birth and early childhood. The story has a narrator recounting Krishna's life to a younger person, and everything is told for a kind of omniscient point of view, but the story seems to only have information from those around Krishna.

Most of the story focuses on the amazing, if sometimes silly, exploits of baby Krishna. It's actually different from what I'm used to in stories of Krishna. Generally, Krishna is treated as if he has an adult's mind from birth, and there is a bit of that here and there, but for the most part, Krishna is very childlike.

They glazed over my favorite part which is when Krishna eats some fruit that he wasn't supposed to. They didn't even mention the fruit. They just talked about the boys tattling on Krishna, and his mother seeing the universe in his mouth.

Krishna knocking over two trees
taken from Bhagawat

I think my favorite part from this story is when he topples two trees because he walked between them with a mortar on his back. Apparently, he freed a couple of cursed beings, but they don't really say what happened to them. That might be worth looking into.